Friday Finds: Mazen Maarouf’s ‘Portion of Jam’

Mazen Maarouf’s Almultaqa Prize-winning short-story collection — Jokes for the Gunmen — was published this month in Jonathan Wright’s English translation:

If this collection doesn’t make a notable-book or translation-award list, I’ll have to eat the hat I already ate when Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work wasn’t longlisted for the 2016 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Or, who knows, buy a new hat.

The story is published at Granta magazine; the book is out from Granta Books. Although the stories aren’t linked, they are told through a series of linked voices, all of which echo a wide-eyed, surrealist naïveté that is our guide to civil war, dementia, adolescence, and other events that are impossible to understand. Maarouf first came to the literary world’s attention as a poet, and these stories could also be long narrative poems.